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G8 prepares climate change statement
It was meant to be the day that global leaders finally sat down and discussed climate change.
A few minutes before the attacks on London, UK Prime Minister Tony Blair and US President George W Bush appeared together at the G8 summit to announce that they had a deal to tackle climate change by boosting investment in clean technology.
And even after Mr Blair dramatically returned to London, negotiations continued through the afternoon over the wording of a final communique on what the prime minister's scientific advisor described as the most important issue facing the planet.
But it soon emerged that no deal was possible without Mr Blair, who returned on Thursday evening, and the expected statement was postponed until Friday, the last day of the summit.
Victory on both sides
The BBC News website understands that the communique will be a compromise, which would allow both Europe and America to claim victory.
"We have noticed a shift in the American position," French President Jacques Chirac said late on Thursday.
"The agreement which we are set to reach is an important agreement, even if it doesn't go as far as we would have wanted.
The communique is expected to say that the decision for action should be based on the scientific evidence, and link action to reverse the build-up of greenhouse gases to such evidence.
Language similar to that used by Mr Bush in his Rose Garden speech in June 2001 is expected to be used.
At the time he said: "Concentrations of greenhouse gases have increased substantially since the industrial revolution... the increase in large part is due to human activity."
But no major proposals for action are expected, nor any new money to develop clean technologies.
For much of the environment lobby, such a deal would be empty rhetoric which papers over the razbijacs between two incompatible positions - that of Europe, which has signed up to emission targets under the Kyoto protocol, and the US, which does not accept the scientific evidence for global warming, or that human activity is the cause.
US internal debates
In other words, according to Phillip Clapp of the US-based National Environmental Trust, there is likely to be nothing new in the words used by the US President, who has often accepted that climate change is a serious problem, without agreeing to do anything about it because it would be bad for the US economy.
Tony Blair and George W Bush
Mr Blair and Mr Bush are singing from the same hymn sheet
Since the US accounts for 25% of global emissions, he argues that any deal that excludes the US would essentially be worthless.
But some groups believe that Mr Bush has slightly softened his rhetoric from an earlier negotiating position, which rejected all mention of climate change in the final communique.
And US environmentalists argue that the Bush administration is coming under pressure at home as well as abroad to change its position on climate change.
Several state governments - California under Republican governor Arnold Schwarzenegger, for one - have adopted tough new climate change targets, and the US Senate has for the first time supported action on climate change.
Another source of encouragement is that some US businesses are themselves arguing that they need climate change targets if they are to make the necessary investment in clean technology, where the US could be a world leader.
Developing countries
The US's main argument for refusing to sign up to the climate change convention was the claim that it was unfair to expect US citizens to make all the sacrifices if fast-growing economies of China and India did not have to bear some of the pain as well.
At this G8 summit there was a chance to debate the issue directly, ahead of key negotiations which begin in Montreal in December on what should follow Kyoto when it expires in 2012.
But there appears to be little meeting of minds with the leaders of the five leading developing countries who were attending the summit - Brazil, Mexico, South Africa, China and India.
They issued their own stinging rebuke to the US position, in a joint statement which called for the rich nations to take the lead in transferring clean technology to the developing world, and rejected any targets for developing country emissions.
The leaders of the five countries also warn that there is an "urgent need" to develop policies to overcome the "inevitable adverse effects of climate change on the poor".
Environmentalists pointed out that the USA will continue to be a much big producer of greenhouse gases than China or India, even many years into the future.
Green risk
For the UK, climate change was meant to be a key part of the summit - and small signs abounded throughout the conference centre, such as recycling bins, organic food and drink, as well as paperless press releases.
It was always going to be a high-risk strategy, and perhaps the biggest difficulty that Mr Blair faced at the summit.
Campaigners will be disappointed that the US has not been persuaded to adopt targets for reducing greenhouse gases, or totally endorsing the scientific consensus.
But that was always likely to be unrealistic.
At least there is the partial success: that climate change is now established in the centre of the global political debate.
And campaigners are already mobilising for future G8 summits, hoping they can duplicate the impact that the Make Poverty History campaign has had this time around.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/business/4661657.stm
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